compress all files on the steam deck?

[Master MonGecko]

Im thinking of getting a steam deck but I'm not sure that the highest end steam deck has enough storage for the games I want to play. Is there a way to compress the whole drive (like you can in windows) to save some space?

[retrogunner]

out of the box - no (at least not that I'm aware of). You could install Windows 10/11 on it if your use-case needs it (and you accept what limited support you'd get from Valve.)

Linux can do compressed filesystems. IIRC the Deck is using btrfs for much of the OS partitions which does support transparent file compression but is not currently in use. The SD Card format feature uses EXT4. You could manually format it in Desktop mode. And IIRC, /home also uses EXT4 (I lack the time to check at the moment)

A search[www.google.com] revealed this in the first hit (there's several Deck subreddits you should always check beside this forum.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/t76wh6/compressing_storage_with_btrfs/

Good luck. Cheers.

[Punkovich]

I really wouldn't recommend fiddling with the partitioning of the internal drive unless you really know your way around the linux command prompts already. Might want to familiarize yourself with the recovery image process first (I'm not even sure if the recover image will fix partitions lol)

I'd say best bet would be invest in a decent size SDcard net you more space than the maybe 10% you'd get from compression.

[Master MonGecko]

引用自 Punkovich：

I really wouldn't recommend fiddling with the partitioning of the internal drive unless you really know your way around the linux command prompts already. Might want to familiarize yourself with the recovery image process first (I'm not even sure if the recover image will fix partitions lol)

I'd say best bet would be invest in a decent size SDcard net you more space than the maybe 10% you'd get from compression.

Yeah I'm not a Linux user myself but on windows you can just go to drive settings and click "compress drive" and it splits the storage in half. I was just wondering if there was anything like that for steamOS

[Master MonGecko]

引用自 retrogunner：

out of the box - no (at least not that I'm aware of). You could install Windows 10/11 on it if your use-case needs it (and you accept what limited support you'd get from Valve.)

Linux can do compressed filesystems. IIRC the Deck is using btrfs for much of the OS partitions which does support transparent file compression but is not currently in use. The SD Card format feature uses EXT4. You could manually format it in Desktop mode. And IIRC, /home also uses EXT4 (I lack the time to check at the moment)

A search[www.google.com] revealed this in the first hit (there's several Deck subreddits you should always check beside this forum.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/t76wh6/compressing_storage_with_btrfs/

Good luck. Cheers.

Oh alright thanks for the quick response!

[Minneyar]

There is not a quick-and-easy, built-in way to do this.

With that said, it is possible to convert your Steam Deck's /home partition to btrfs, which supports transparent compression, and somebody has written some scripts to automate that here: https://gitlab.com/popsulfr/steamos-btrfs/

Keep in mind that it's still a fairly technical process, and if anything goes wrong, your only option will probably be to completely flash the drive on your Deck (unless you are technically knowledgeable about debugging Linux filesystem issues).

[Master MonGecko]

引用自 Minneyar：

There is not a quick-and-easy, built-in way to do this.

With that said, it is possible to convert your Steam Deck's /home partition to btrfs, which supports transparent compression, and somebody has written some scripts to automate that here: https://gitlab.com/popsulfr/steamos-btrfs/

Keep in mind that it's still a fairly technical process, and if anything goes wrong, your only option will probably be to completely flash the drive on your Deck (unless you are technically knowledgeable about debugging Linux filesystem issues).

Yikes I wish linux had some features that windows has lol. Looks like my only option is to do what you said or install windows (even more yikes) :/

[Minneyar]

引用自 Master Mongecko：

Yikes I wish linux had some features that windows has lol. Looks like my only option is to do what you said or install windows (even more yikes) :/

To be fair, if you're just running Linux natively on a desktop computer, it's trivially easy to enable. Valve intentionally makes it difficult to make system-level changes to the Deck to prevent people from bricking their Decks and then complaining about it, and they probably didn't add a way in the UI to enable filesystem compression because it's a very niche feature and it's impossible to predict what kind of impact it will have on performance.